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Wednesday, 22 October 2014

Blue Lily, Lily Blue review

Blue Lily, Lily BlueMaggie StiefvaterOctober 21st 2014ScholasticThere is danger in dreaming. But there is even more danger in waking up.

Blue Sargent has found things. For the first time in her life, she has friends she can trust, a group to which she can belong. The Raven Boys have taken her in as one of their own. Their problems have become hers, and her problems have become theirs.

The trick with found things though, is how easily they can be lost.

Friends can betray.Mothers can disappear.Visions can mislead. Certainties can unravel.Look at me, posting a review for a book that actually recently came out! It's been a while since that last happened, but you know how it is with Maggie Stiefvater's books. The minute you finish them, you just kind of want to sit there for a while and absorb everything that you've just read, while feeling empty at the fact that it's over and then also wanting to tell everyone on the planet how good that book was. Blue Lily, Lily Blue was no different. It's an incredible book in an incredible series by an incredible author.Maggie Stiefvater is an amazing writer, but I always forget just how amazing she is until I read another one of her books and am reminded. I feel like there will never be a book of hers that I actively dislike just because of how good she is at crafting sentences, characters, worlds. She is just so skillful and talented that it kind of makes me want to cry, but in a good way. She just has this way of being able to pinpoint a character or a location in such a way that you would never expect but makes perfect sense when you think about it. Things are described in such a way that are so peculiar and yet so accurate that you feel like you'll never get the same sense of things as you do the things in one of Maggie's books. I don't know if that made any sense, but you get what I'm saying. If you've read one of her books before then you know. You know what I'm talking about.The other thing, specifically about The Raven Cycle, is that I always feel like they just shouldn't work. When you really think about it, a series of young adult books about four private school boys and a girl who comes from a family of psychics looking for the body of an old Welsh king along Ley Lines in a small town in Virginia is just kind of weird. But it just WORKS so damn well and it's such a perfect series and I constantly wonder why everyone hasn't read these books because they are so incredibly good. And they just keep on getting better. I even liked Adam's POV in this book! Usually I'm kind of meh about Adam, but CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT and BEING BONDED TO A MAGICAL FOREST and ADAM AND RONAN HANGING OUT.I also loved that a lot of this book was about Blue. I love the whole gang, obviously, but I love Blue a lot so I was really happy to see more of her after The Dream Thieves (though I also love that book because I love Ronan a lot). It's just these characters and their relationships to each other matter so much to me. They have one of best and most interesting dynamics going on and they are so close to my heart I just want to keep them all safe. I'm not even remotely ready for the series to be over with only one more book. It feels like they should go on forever, having adventures, looking for dead kings. Blue and her Raven Boys. Now I really get how other people usually feel about series ending. It doesn't feel fair for this series to end.And it's not just the characters, it's the plot, too. I can never tell where the books in this series are going to end up, not really because they're unpredictable as such, because I'm rarely shocked at what happens (although there is a THING that happens in this book that I am still kind of reeling about). It's just that you kind of get taken along for the ride in a way where you don't want to think about what's going to happen next because that would require being taken out of the moment of the book where you're at. Also, like with Maggie's writing, things rarely happen that you expect, but you realise that there was no other way these things could have happened. Everything is just... right.Okay, I have gone way over into obsessive fangirling so I'm going to cut this short while I'm ahead before i start making even less sense. All you really need to know is that Blue Lily, Lily Blue is exactly as good as you thought it would be, even if there is no Ronan POV. Maggie Stiefvater is a gift. The Raven Cycle is brilliant.